Friday, June 5, 2009

Martin Desruisseaux has recently stepped down, after devoting many years of service to the GeoTools community. Martin has been the long time module maintainer of our referencing module.

Martin joined GeoTools as part of a collaboration between his project (SeaGIS) and our founder James Macgill's applet based GeoTools 1.0 project. It was the collaboration between these two individuals that really kick started the GeoTools 2 project. Martin brought a rigorous scientific perspective to the project. He was also instrumental in GeoTools adopting OGC standards which initially served as as way to reduce the documentation burden of the library. The community gradually came to appreciate the value of the standards in providing common names and concepts, indeed a common reference point, for development work.

The Dynamic Desruisseaux-Macgill Duo's second experiment was the GeoAPI project, prompted by the need to come to grips with large XML based standards for Java developers and as an out reach to other libraries of the time such as Deegree and GeOxygen. GeoAPI has since taken on a life as its own: first being aligned with "GO-1" and then, through Martin's involvement, becoming a distinct GeoAPI working group.

We would like to sincerely thank Martin for his many, major contributions to GeoTools and we look forward to future collaborations as they arise.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

We are glad to announce that three new members have been appointed recently to the GeoTools Project Management Committee, the entity that is responsible for steering the GeoTools projects itself. The new members are Michael Bedward, Christian Mueller and Ben Caradoc-Davies, you can find a brief bio down below.

We would to thank outgoing PMC member Martin Desruisseaux for his years of service to the GeoTools community.

The GeoTools project has recently been going through major changes, with a few long-term members leaving to follow their interests. One benefit of these changes for GeoTools has been to provide fresh ideas and new momentum. A major review of the code base is presently underway to make the library more coherent, more reliable and easier to use.

Michael Bedward is an ecologist with the Department of Environment and Climate Change, Sydney, Australia. He has over twenty years of professional experience in ecological field studies, vegetation mapping, conservation planning, statistical analysis of complex data and simulation modelling. His research has been regularly published in Australian and international scientific journals and presented at numerous conferences and workshops. Michael’s current research isconcerned with predicting the dynamics and extinction risk of wildlife populations in landscapes subject to past and continuing habitat destruction, wildfire and climatic fluctuations. This work brings together remotely sensed geospatial data, field observations and specially developed simulation models.

Christian Mueller works as an IT-professional since 25 years. He studied computer science at the Technical University of Vienna and is now about to finish his GIS postgraduate study at the university of Salzburg, Austria. The focus of his work is about DB systems, operating systems, programming and since 3 years, geographical information systems. Most of the knowledge is based on IBM and Open Source products. At the moment he is building up a GIS infrastructure for the a big Austrian enterprise collecting and visualizing statistical data and to prepare this enterprise for the INSPIRE directive of the European Community. At the moment of this writing, he is a module maintainer for three modules, working on his fourth module during the GSOC 2009.

Ben Caradoc-Davies obtained his doctorate in computational physics from the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2000, for numerical studies of vortex dynamics in Bose-Einstein condensates. Since 2001, he has worked as a software developer in Perth, Western Australia. His experience includes development of software for: oceanographic and meteorological modelling, data processing, and analysis, in support of the offshore oil and gas industries; geophysical quantitative interpretation for resource exploration; and since 2007, the exchange of geoscience information via interoperable web services. Ben currently works for CSIRO Exploration and Mining [1] as the lead developer of the Web Feature Service component of the AuScope Spatial Information Services Stack [2]. In this role, he is maintainer of the application schema (complex feature) modules of GeoTools and GeoServer, and collaborates with AuScope stakeholders and GeoScience Markup Language (GeoSciML) Testbed participants to improve GeoSciML support in GeoTools and GeoServer. Ben is an open source software fanatic, and has been a Linux systems administrator since 1995. Ben is happy to use proprietary software where it belongs: on game consoles.

[1] The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency.http://www.csiro.au/